The Auctioneer

“Please, ma’am,” John said. “In my whole life no one ever called me a crackpot. I been tendin’ my business, bidin’ my time, waitin’ for this to blow over. I never lodged a complaint before. I let others better outfitted than me do that. But I can’t wait no more. I’d be real quick. Three minutes. You got no call to stop me when I got a reason good as this.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said, resuming her licorice voice. “He’s unavailable to random callers. You must understand the governor is a very busy man. There’s an election campaign just over, and Christmas coming. And then there was that terrible fire over in Manchester, and he’s very busy trying to organize some relief. And right at the moment all his aides are pretty well tied up too. Think of all the important things they have to look after—that broken dam up in Artemis that’s left all those poor people homeless. The welfare problem in the state—you just don’t know how bad it’s got.”

“But this here is people in trouble too,” John said, but he wasn’t sure, even as he stood there begging, that his problem was as important as all those other things. A broken dam was, after all, something you could stand in front of and look straight at.

“I would suggest that your problem is one for the police,” said the woman.

“Gosh sakes, who?” John asked, feeling the quick heat rise to his face. “I called all them. What’s a body got to do around here? Bust a dam? Burn a town?”

“That’d do it all right,” said the woman, giggling. When John made no response, she said, “Look, if you’re all that upset, you can come in here and make out a formal statement. The girls in the office here will tell you how to do it. If you want to bring charges, we’ll help you with the forms, and get you in to see a judge. But you can’t do these things on the telephone. How do I know who you are?”

“I can’t do that,” John moaned. “There’s too many people ready to steal my child, shoot my wife—God only knows.”

“If you feel the need for police protection, sir, you should discuss the matter with the police,” she said, more gently now.

John held onto the phone until the woman asked if he was there still and if he didn’t want to come in. Then, because he was incapable of speaking any more, he hung up.

11

He walked back to the truck, his body aching with fatigue. He folded his arms on the wide black steering wheel and rested his head against them. He more or less believed in the police, despite Cogswell’s warning about the troopers. At least he always had. It didn’t come naturally not to believe in them. In the police, and the army, and the country, and the goodness of his neighbor. He had accepted the inflation that made his milk worth less and less, and he had accepted the certification regulations which finally made it impossible for him to sell his milk at all. He accepted the fact that he was still living the way his grandfather had, while people in the towns and cities were filling their lives with expensive gadgets. He saw all the cars and the dishwashers and the cabins on the lakes and the trips hither and yon in fancy trailers and he dismissed them as a fragile tower that could be toppled in a cold wind. He let the tables and chairs go, and the tools and machinery, and even the cows, because of the land. Because the land was free and clear. Because he believed that a good piece of land was the only true security there was—the only security a family needed. Some man with a ski resort in mind had offered him forty-five thousand dollars for his land when Hildie was a baby, and he had laughed. “You could retire on that,” the stranger had reminded him. Money ain’t like land,” John had answered.

“Money gets stole. It loses value. Banks go bust. But my baby will always have that land.”

Perhaps he should go and speak to Captain Sullivan. Perhaps Sullivan had only chanced to meet Perly hunting or visiting and didn’t know him at all. After all, everybody who met Perly was impressed with him. But when he tried to picture Captain Sullivan, he saw Perly bending over Hildie, his face shining with promises of magic. Promises.

At the thought of Hildie, he lifted his head and looked around himself nervously. At this very moment, Gore and his deputies could be fanning out on all the roads from Concord, watching to see who it was that had made the phone calls-watching through rifle sights. If they had read his voice, they could be bearing down even now on Ma and Mim and Hildie as they went about their chores on the farm, alone. He had been gone almost six hours.

He headed out of Concord toward the turnpike, his stomach churning with hunger and impatience with the traffic. Once he was on the turnpike, the old truck hit sixty and the sense of rapid movement and direction and of perfect insulation from the rest of the world brought John to a sudden understanding of what he must do.